Welcome to Karmic Koala Alpha 6, which will in time become Ubuntu 9.10.

Pre-releases of Karmic are *not* encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting, and fixing bugs.

Alpha 6 is the sixth in a series of milestone CD images that will be released throughout the Karmic development cycle. The Alpha images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper CD build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of Karmic. You can download it here:

Alpha 6 includes a number of software updates that are ready for large-scale testing. This is an early set of images so you should expect some bugs; in particular, there are a number of known issues related to recent boot performance changes that will be fixed between now and the Ubuntu 9.10 Beta. For a list of known bugs that you don't need to report if you encounter, and that you might want to pay close attention to before upgrading, please see:

We also suggest that you subscribe to the ubuntu-devel-announce list if you're interested in following Ubuntu development. This is a low-traffic list (a few posts a week) carrying announcements of approved specifications, policy changes, alpha releases, and other interesting events.